Kinda thinking of that post that’s saying the Pokemon in Detective Pikachu are good because they’re “cartoony” when in reality they’re pretty realistic, but keep a good balance between their cartoonishness without the creepy hyperrealistic renderings we’re used to seeing out of edgelord artists. Ironically, the people who did this movie took a lot of cues from an artist on Deviantart who did hyperrealistic-looking Pokemon.
I dunno, these look pretty realistic to me. The key is they render the cartoony elements (like Majikarp’s eyes and the shape of his fins) pretty accurately so it doesn’t just look like a rat hauling a weird fish, you can tell that’s a Pikachu and a Majikarp.
They also did a good job keeping most of the cute Pokemon looking fairly cute,
although you can still get moments where Aipom and Jigglypuff appear legitimately creepy and threatening when angered.
Then there are Pokemon who are odd-looking because they were always meant to appear odd-looking
And the ‘scary’ Pokemon actually look like dangerous, powerful monsters!
What I like about these designs is that they’ve got a good balance of traits that make them instantly recognizable enough that any Pokemon fan can name them at a glance, but given just enough nuance and realistic elements that presumably wouldn’t render very well in a cartoon. (For example, the little hairs on the inner part of Jigglypuff’s ears, Pikachu’s fluffy fur, and Charizard’s rough, dinosaur-like scales).
You can tell the people behind the design choices are really passionate about Pokemon and wanted to create characters you could easily suspend your disbelief to accept and also fully enjoy with the original ‘flavor’ of Pokemon as a long-time fan.
And anyway I just wanted to talk about how cool that all was.
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